Generally, many electrical connectors include opposed mateable male and female electrical connector halves, each of which includes a nonconductive or dielectric housing and at least one electrical terminal securely mounted therein. Electrical conductors or lead wires may be joined to the terminals mounted in the housings. On the other hand, the dielectric housing of at least one half of the electrical connector assembly may be mounted to a printed circuit board.
When electrically connecting two connectors, some lead-in is always provided to accommodate minor misalignment between the connectors. In some instances, particularly when interconnecting two parallel printed circuit boards by means of a pair of connectors, a person may not be able to see the connectors very well or the accuracy of a mechanical alignment mechanism separate from the connectors (such as a rack and panel arrangement) may be insufficient. Such situations are often referred to as blind mate arrangements and require a structure to overcome significant misalignment. Accordingly, it is sometimes desirable to include a course alignment or blind mate feature in order to simplify mating of the printed circuit boards. In addition, it is desirable to polarize mating connectors to prevent the connectors from being mated in an incorrect orientation. Some prior art connector assemblies have blind mate projections on one connector and complementary receptacles or apertures in the other connector that are offset from the longitudinal centerlines of the connectors in order to provide polarization. An example of such a system is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,199,884 to Kaufman et al., dated Aug. 6, 1993. One of the problems with those types of polarization systems is that, as the connectors become smaller or miniaturized, it becomes more and more difficult for a user to see the initial correct orientation because the amount of offset from the centerlines of the connectors will decrease due to minimum wall thickness requirements of the dielectric housings of the connectors. The present invention is directed to providing a polarization system in a blind mateable electrical connector assembly which solves these and other problems of the prior art.